ResourceBlog Article: What's A Froogle?

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Thursday, 12th December 2002

What's A Froogle?

Web Search
Another New Beta From Google: Product Information from Froogle
Could a December pass without something new coming from Google? Not this year. It's nearing mid-month and we now know about another new beta.
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Quick Review
About a year ago Google launched Google Catalogs. It's still online and (in beta) utilizes ocr (optical character recognition) to keyword search the full-images of over 5000 retail catalogs (U.S. only). This is one of the first uses of ocr technology by a web search company in a public product.
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New For 2002
This year Google is launching Froogle. It debuted yesterday.
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What's a Froogle?
From the news release, "Froogle was developed in response to feedback from Google users requesting an easier way to find product information." From the site, "As Google's spidering software crawls the Internet, it automatically identifies webpages that offer products for sale. These are the pages Froogle searches when you enter the name of an item you want to find. Froogle also includes product information submitted electronically by merchants. Froogle's search results are automatically generated by our ranking software. Google does not accept payment for inclusion of products in our search results. Nor do we offer to place a merchant site higher in the results if they are an advertiser or offer to pay for that placement."
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Froogle Fast Facts
1) An Advanced Search Interface is Available. Here you can limit by price range, product category, and where your keywords appear (product desciption, and/or product name).
2) Each Search Results Page Also Contains Limiting Options
3) Froogle Can Be Browsed by Category
4) Only Supporting U.S. Merchants and English Language at This Time
5) Merchants Can Choose to Supply a "Data Feed" of Current Product Info for Inclusion into Froogle. No charge to do this (at this time).
6) A Image of the Product Appears Next To Each Entry
7) Material in the Froogle Database is Built Using Data Identified in Google's Web Crawl. In essence, they've created a crawler/spider able to recognize product and price information.
7) Froogle Gives the Company Another Location to Place Advertising (Sponsored Links). For example, a search for socks not only shows material from the Froogle database But Also Shows Sponsored Links from Companies who "Purchase" the Term(s).
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Finally
Search geeks out there will no doubt realize that Froogle is also the debut of what appears to be some rather sophisticated and "smart" web crawling technology. Business, marketing, and CI types will find immediate value with the wide scope of material covered in the database. You can imagine the many places (personalization, alerts, display, etc.) Google can go with this product. It also once again illustrates the usefulness of "specialty search tools" whether or not they're from Google or any other web search provider. Instead of search through "everything" a narrower, focused universe of materials can often greatly improve precision and you time. The challege is knowing where to start and which tool to choose. More later after we have some time use and compare with similar online search tools like PriceGrabber.Com.
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See Also: More from Search Day
See Also: Even More via the Froogle FAQ
See Also: The ResourceShelf Post About the Debut of Google Catalogs from 12/15/01

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